Business-critical applications, including key customer-facing applications, are carried out on servers, i.e., computer programs employing a variety of technologies, including Java J2EE technologies from Sun Microsystems. Methods and systems have been designed and implemented to monitor the behavior of servers for purposes of fault diagnosis and monitoring of efficiency of processing. However, many individual tasks are carried out on more than one server. Indeed, the different servers may employ differing operating systems and application server software. For example, a financial services transaction may involve a Java-based front end and IBM's Customer Information Control System (“CICS”) based servers for executing transactions. There are numerous other examples of two and more.
Existing methods and systems can monitor a server based on a single technology, such as a Java-based server. However, those processes and systems cannot monitor and depict for the user an entire task. Existing methods and systems cannot correlate processes carried out on one server with those carried out on another. Thus, it is difficult to identify sources of problems in tasks. For example, if a process appears to be stalled on the Java server, the cause may be in the process itself, or may be because the process is functioning properly, but is awaiting data from the CICS-based server.